I promise to never do this again....................

Bee Gees.................................Night Fever

Jeff's feeling it...........................

Go read about a sweet and nostalgic look at the candy stores of our youth.  It resonates; although I would have swapped out the Fantastic Four for Sgt. Rock and Easy Company.

Awful way...............................

Sam Cooke...........................Another Saturday Night

Wary...............................

"Democracy has two excesses to be wary of:  the spirit of inequality, which leads to aristocracy, and the spirit of extreme equality, which leads it to despotism."
-De Montesquieu

Just another "ism"........................

"Cynicism such as one finds very frequently among the most highly educated young men and women of the West results from the combination of comfort and powerlessness."
-Bertrand Russell

cartoon via

Saturday morning with Sidney Harris.................

all cartoons via

The kids think this belongs by our new driveway....

courtesy of

Take wing........................

R.E.M.................................I'll Take The Rain

Never..................................

via

The Mighty E.............................

The ever-creative Eclecticity keeps cranking out the blog art.
To see most, probably not all, but most, of his blog headers
as art, click on the Eclecticity link under the "Labels" section.
Here are his entries from the past two months:

Hold on.......................

Them......................................Friday's Child

Ouch......................

Spengler frets about the recent lack of "inventiveness" in the good old U. S. of A.  Full essay is here.  Money quote is here:

"In short, the United States does not have a tech sector. It has mature consumer businesses operating under the technology label. They walk like mature consumer businesses, quack like mature consumer businesses, and fly like mature consumer businesses. They are run by patent lawyers rather than engineers."

Ornery.............................

Feels like an R.E.M. kind of day...............

R.E.M...................................Man On the Moon

File under the heading...................

.............of half the facts you know are wrong.  

Reason.com offers this essay pointing to Samuel Arbesman's,  new book The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date. Arbesman suggests that all those precious facts we memorized in school may, in fact, not be facts.  I'm crushed.  Dinosaurs were not coldblooded?  Miss Bell misled me?  As much as that revelation hurt, the author then gets personal:

"The Web is great for finding an up-to-date list of the 10 biggest cities in the United States, but if the scientific literature is littered with wrong facts, then cyberspace is an enticing quagmire of falsehoods, propaganda, and just plain bunkum."

I do like this conclusion, however:

"There simply is no substitute for skepticism."

thanks craig

Experience has its virtues..................

..................and the Execupundit lays them out for us.  His list of 21 is here.  A wee sampling is here:

13.  A few of your facts aren't facts.
14.  Logic is a foreign tongue to many.
15.  One size doesn't fit all.

As good a reason as any...............

...........for open/free trade:

"When goods don't cross borders, armies will."
-Frederic Bastiat

More from Bastiat.............

French political economist Frederic Bastiat  1801-1850

"If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?"

"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it."

"It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder."

"The State is the great fiction through which everyone endeavours to live at the expense of everyone else."

"Competition is merely the absence of oppression"

"By virtue of exchange, one man's prosperity is beneficial to all others."

“Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough.” 

Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.” 

“The worst thing that can happen to a good cause is, not to be skillfully attacked, but to be ineptly defended.”

Heard................................

via

Milton Friedman schools Phil Donahue..........

...................................and makes it look easy.